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Even the facts known in advance were reason enough for outrage: Five live terrorists, including child-killer Samir Kuntar, plus 199 bodies, were exchanged for two corpses. As numerous analysts have noted, once the dead can be ransomed as easily as the living, kidnappers have little incentive to keep their victims alive.
Moreover, the deal clearly inflated the price for Gilad Schalit, or any other kidnapped soldier known to be alive. After all, if Hizbullah can obtain a vicious murderer in exchange for two corpses, a live soldier ought to be worth dozens or hundreds of such murderers. And indeed, Palestinians say the swap bolstered Hamas’s resolve not to compromise on its original demands – whereas cabinet ministers declared on Sunday that Israel is now obligated to accept many of these demands, since it cannot ransom corpses while refusing to ransom a living soldier.
This is particularly grave because Hamas has greatly upped the ante on Israel’s already lopsided prisoner swaps. Previous deals entailed ratios of around 450:1 (which is precisely why no thinking person could have imagined that Hizbullah would free living captives in exchange for a mere five terrorists). But Hamas is demanding a 1,000:1 ratio: 450 prisoners whose identities it will dictate, plus 550 chosen by Israel and released later in what our cabinet euphemistically terms a “gesture to [Palestinian leader] Mahmoud Abbas” – as if anyone were incapable of figuring out who really secured this “gesture.” Moreover, whereas the most vicious killers were generally excluded from previous deals, Hamas is demanding hundreds of mass murderers in exchange for Schalit. Indeed, its list is so outrageous that the cabinet has thus far approved only 71 of the 450 names. Yet now, ministers are saying they must capitulate.
ALL THIS was obvious in advance, and should have been reason enough for a responsible cabinet to refuse the deal. Yet new details that have emerged make the picture even worse.
First, prior to the swap, the media repeatedly reported that Israel would not release Palestinians, it would only release Lebanese. Now, however, it turns out that the government promised to free “a few dozen” Palestinians at a later date, as a “gesture to the UN” (as if anyone will believe that). Clearly, this worsens the deal’s ratio substantially. Even more disturbing, however, these prisoners will reportedly include older Fatah members serving long sentences for serious attacks – the very people Israel has repeatedly refused to release to Abbas.
Personally, I oppose releasing terrorists to anyone. But allowing Hizbullah to achieve through violence what Abbas has been unable to achieve through negotiations is the worst of all possible worlds. Nothing could more clearly demonstrate that terror, not peace, is the best tactic to use.
Second, according to the cabinet’s original decision, the swap was conditional on Hizbullah providing satisfactory information about missing navigator Ron Arad. Yet last week, the cabinet unanimously voted Hizbullah’s report completely inadequate – and then approved the swap anyway. It thereby once again proved that Israel has no red lines, that any “condition” it sets can be violated with impunity.
Granted, governments have violated their own red lines before. Yet each such incidence further weakens the government’s ability to set credible red lines in the future.
MOST APPALLING of all, however, was the revelation that the government knew all along that the soldiers were dead: According to last week’s media reports, an army investigation submitted in August 2006, about a month after the kidnapping, concluded that given the weapons used in the ambush, where they hit the armored personnel carrier, where the soldiers were sitting in the APC and other factors, one soldier was almost certainly killed instantly and the other mortally wounded.
Yet rather than announce this fact, which would have greatly reduced public pressure for a deal, the government deliberately concealed it. And since government officials had said repeatedly during the month after the kidnapping that the soldiers were believed to be alive, their failure to correct this assessment naturally led people to conclude that it still held.
Even worse, government officials continued actively misleading the public on this issue. On December 4, 2006, for instance, Ehud Olmert publicly termed the soldiers “men whom I hope are alive” – thereby fostering the illusion that they were.
Later, the government did start saying the soldiers might be dead. But it never declared them dead officially or publicized the evidence pointing to this conclusion.
The result was predictable: Most of the public, and the media, believed the soldiers were (or might be) alive, and therefore launched a massive campaign for their return – one that Tzahi Hanegbi, a senior member of Olmert’s party, said last week no premier could have withstood.
Yet even ignoring the obvious point that a leader’s job is to shape public opinion, not be led by it, Olmert could easily have eliminated this particular pressure simply by hammering home the truth: that the soldiers were almost certainly dead. Why he chose instead to lie remains a mystery; one can only speculate that, with the public already enraged over the failed Lebanon war, he was afraid to admit that the soldiers whose return was the war’s ostensible goal had in fact been dead all along – even though he could not have known this when it began.
But whatever the reason, the outcome is unchanged: Olmert and his government deliberately misled the public about the soldiers’ fate, thereby effectively collaborating with Hizbullah in encouraging public pressure for a bad deal. And Israelis will be paying the price of this deal for a long time to come.
Shaba, located where Israel, Syria and Lebanon meet, was excluded from Israel’s 2000 pullout from Lebanon because UN mapping experts ruled that it was Syrian rather than Lebanese. But Israel quit every inch of territory that the UN did deem Lebanese, and the Security Council unanimously certified this withdrawal as complete.
Immediately after the pullout, however, Hizbullah began claiming that Shaba was also Lebanese; hence Israel was still occupying Lebanon, and Hizbullah must continue attacking it. The Lebanese government backed this claim, and Syria, to fuel the flames, refused to either assert or withdraw its own claim.
All this was eminently predictable. But the world’s response was shocking: Rather than upholding the Security Council’s unanimous determination regarding the border, both the media and world leaders began describing Shaba as “disputed territory” and muttering about the need to resolve this new “dispute.”
This process culminated in Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the Second Lebanon War in 2006. The resolution, noting “a need to address urgently the causes of the current crisis,” tasked the UN with delineating Lebanon’s borders, “especially in those areas where the border is disputed or uncertain, including by dealing with the Shebaa [Shaba] farms area.” In other words, rather than penalizing Hizbullah for the cross-border raid that sparked the war, the council voted unanimously to appease it by abandoning its own previous certification of Israel’s withdrawal as complete.
UN EXPERTS are therefore currently mapping the border. But the US is not even waiting for their conclusions: It has already decided that Shaba must be given to Lebanon. Last month, the Lebanese daily Al-Hayat quoted Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as telling Lebanese officials that Washington was working to secure Israel’s withdrawal from Shaba. And Israeli officials told the Israeli press they had received the same message from both Rice and President George W. Bush.
Even more astonishing, however, is the reasoning Rice and Bush offer for abandoning the Security Council’s unanimous decision of 2000: They want to support the Lebanese government, they say, and the best way to do so is for Israel to give Shaba to Lebanon, thereby removing Hizbullah’s latest excuse for retaining its arms.
That, of course, was precisely the argument for Israel’s original withdrawal from Lebanon: Once the IDF left, Hizbullah would no longer have any excuse for belligerence. But Hizbullah immediately concocted a new excuse: Shaba. Thus world leaders ought to have realized that demanding yet another Israeli withdrawal fit the classic definition of insanity: doing the same thing and expecting different results.
But since they seem incapable of connecting the dots themselves, the deputy chair of Lebanon’s Supreme Shi’ite Islamic Council, Sheikh Abed al-Amir Kiblan, helpfully did it for them during a conference in southern Lebanon last week. According to the Hizbullah-affiliated daily Al-Akhbar, Kiblan declared that seven villages whose Shi’ite inhabitants fled in 1948, and which were subsequently destroyed, “must return to their owners, our country and our people,” and Hizbullah’s arms would achieve this.
In other words, ceding Shaba would not eliminate Hizbullah’s pretext for keeping its arms; the organization already has its next pretext – this time located in pre-1967 Israel – all lined up and ready to go.
BUT PRESSING Israel to cede Shaba is worse than pointless; it is destructive. By demonstrating that no border, even if unanimously certified by the Security Council, is actually final – that each “certified” border is merely a starting point for new territorial claims – it would preclude any chance of Middle East peace.
Clearly, Israel would have no incentive for additional withdrawals under these circumstances. The point of withdrawing to a recognized international border is to a) eliminate your enemy’s reasons for hostilities and b) ensure the world’s backing should your enemy nevertheless continue hostilities. If instead, the world views continued attacks against Israel as grounds for redrawing the international border in the aggressor’s favor, then from Israel’s standpoint, withdrawing is counterproductive: It simply invites further salami-style territorial losses.
Even worse, however, a Hizbullah victory over Shaba would eliminate other countries’ incentive to restrain their own radical organizations. Why should they, if a mere eight years of hostilities by such an organization are sufficient to get the world to back a new territorial claim? This is especially true because in most of Israel’s neighbors, hatred for Israel remains intense. A Pew Global Research poll from last year, for instance, found that more than 70 percent of Egyptians, Jordanians and Palestinians believe that Palestinians’ “rights and needs” cannot be met unless Israel is eradicated.
THUS IF Hizbullah’s tactic succeeds, it would be a win-win proposition for every government in the Middle East: They could simultaneously satisfy their populations by allowing hostilities with Israel to continue, retain international backing by pleading inability to control the radicals and expand their borders at Israel’s expense in the bargain, by claiming that additional Israeli concessions are needed to persuade the radicals to stop fighting.
Moreover, by effectively overturning the long-standing UN principle that acquiring territory through force is unacceptable, ceding Shaba is liable to foment further conflict worldwide. After all, if Hizbullah’s cross-border aggression is grounds for the world to demand that Israel give Lebanon additional territory, why should other countries hungry for a bit of their neighbors’ territory not adopt the same tactic? Just allow an armed organization to perpetrate cross-border raids, claim inability to control it and then demand some of the neighbor’s land to “eliminate the organization’s pretext for keeping its arms.” What could be simpler?
It is rare that a single decision contains the potential for sowing so much havoc. But unless the US, and the world, understand that appeasing Hizbullah at Israel’s expense will only invite further aggression, Shaba could well prove the spark that ignites a chain reaction of international conflicts round the globe.
This problem is not unique to the Supreme Court: Lower courts have also been releasing potentially dangerous people due to inability to hear their cases in a timely fashion. Last month, for instance, the Tel Aviv District Court released the Abu Ghanem brothers to house arrest – although they had confessed to making their sister the seventh of eight Abu Ghanem women to be murdered in “honor killings” over the past six years – because after two years in detention, their trial was still nowhere near completion.
The converse is also true: People who are ultimately acquitted sometimes spend years in jail or under house arrest – with devastating consequences for their work and family life – before a court reaches its verdict. In 2005, for instance, the Jerusalem District Court awarded a defendant NIS 100,000 in compensation for having spent almost two years in detention on charges that were ultimately withdrawn when the prosecution’s chief witness proved hopelessly unreliable.
Nor are civil cases immune from this plague. A recent World Bank study found that enforcing a contract via Israel’s courts takes, on average, 890 days, or almost two and a half years. That is more than twice the norm in Israel’s main competitors, the OECD nations, which makes Israel a less attractive business venue.
THE INORDINATE length of Israeli legal proceedings stems partly from relatively easy-to-solve technical problems. For instance, the Supreme Court is supposed to have 15 justices, but currently has only 12, due to foot-dragging by the Judicial Appointments Committee; several lower courts are similarly short-staffed. More cases should, as Justice Minister Daniel Friedmann recently proposed, be heard by one judge rather than three (especially since Israeli law grants an automatic right of appeal, and appeals are always heard by three judges). Cases could be shifted from courts with heavier workloads to those with lighter workloads. And so forth.
But there is also a major non-technical problem, which is less easily solved: Israeli courts spend far too much time setting national policy – a job that properly belongs to the elected government – at the expense of ordinary civil and criminal cases.
This is especially true of the Supreme Court, which now routinely decides issues that, during its first four decades of existence, it deemed beyond its purview: It vetoes cabinet appointments; dictates budgetary priorities; grants constitutional status to rights that the Knesset explicitly omitted from the Basic Laws; intervenes in army operations during wartime; and sets policy on issues ranging from immigration to the separation fence to gay marriage.
Not only do such issues account for a non-negligible proportion of the court’s caseload, but each such case consumes far more time than an ordinary civil or criminal appeal. Take, for instance, the petitions against a temporary law restricting Palestinian immigration. They were heard by 11 justices, compared to three for ordinary cases. They involved multiple hearings, compared to one for ordinary cases. The verdict was 263 pages long, with each justice writing his own contribution; a normal verdict is typically only a few pages. And then, because the Knesset extended the law, the whole process began again: New petitions were filed against the extension, and seven justices are now reconsidering the issue – whereas ordinary appeals are generally heard only once.
Moreover, the whole dispute revolved around whether the law unduly infringed on a “right to marriage” – a right the Knesset not only never legislated, but deliberately omitted from the Basic Laws. Thus the entire lengthy process stemmed from the court’s assertion of a new constitutional right, in defiance of the only body legally mandated to create such rights!
ASIDE FROM the burden such activism imposes on the court’s own caseload, it also has a trickle-down effect: Many lower court judges take the justices as their model and conclude that they, too, should set policy rather than merely applying the law. This is especially true because the justices dominate the Judicial Appointments Committee, so lower court judges must win their approval to gain promotion. And with activist justices, activism is naturally seen as the way to do so.
Thus you have numerous rulings like the Nazareth District Court’s 2004 decision that the Inheritance Law applies to gay couples, even though the law itself defines a couple as “a man and a woman.” The case would have ended swiftly had the court simply stuck to the letter of the law, dismissed the suit and told the plaintiff to complain to the Knesset. Instead, numerous hearings and a lengthy verdict were needed to explain why “a man and a woman” really means “two men.”
Curbing the Supreme Court’s excessive activism – which in turn would moderate lower court activism – is far more complex than appointing a few new judges. It will almost certainly require legislation to reinstate the norms that the court itself practiced during its first four decades: limits on standing (who can petition the court) and justiciability (which issues the court can hear); a prohibition on overturning government policies merely because the court deems them “extremely unreasonable” (a decision other democracies leave to the voters); and perhaps limits on its right to overturn legislation. Additionally, the Basic Laws should be amended to clarify the rights they enshrine and make them less liable to infinite judicial expansion, and the judicial appointments system must be changed, so that justices no longer pick their own successors. And all this legislation must be carefully crafted to impose sufficient curbs without destroying the court’s genuinely important role as a check on the other branches of government.
Nevertheless, this is essential if Israel is ever to have a functioning court system. Otherwise, we will continue to see criminals roaming the streets because the courts have no time to hear their cases, even as innocent men sit in jail for the same reason.
The scandal began when the Rabbinical Court of Appeals retroactively annulled every conversion ever performed by a special court headed by Rabbi Haim Druckman – thousands of conversions in all. To add insult to injury, the verdict was also larded with personal attacks on Druckman, a leading religious Zionist rabbi.
Then the Prime Minister’s Office’s joined in, dismissing the 75-year-old Druckman as head of the government’s Conversion Authority. Olmert’s excuse – that he was obeying a Civil Service Commission dictate to dismiss a man long past retirement age, not appeasing the ultra-Orthodox parties that dominate the official rabbinate – was transparent nonsense:
Had he truly cared about proper governance rather than appeasing the ultra-Orthodox, he could have asked the commission for an extension so as not to leave the post vacant while he sought a replacement; the commission would surely have acceded. Nor has he rushed to find a replacement since: It took him weeks just to form a search committee.
THE RELIGIOUS Zionist establishment thus had multiple incentives to respond vigorously. First, of course, was the human tragedy: thousands of converts and their children suddenly cast into religious limbo. Second were the national consequences: Assimilating some 300,000 non-Jewish immigrants is a vital national interest; yet why would these immigrants undergo an arduous conversion process if their conversions can be undone at any rabbi’s whim, even decades later? Third was the hillul hashem (literally, desecration of God’s name): The judges claimed that divinely ordained law had mandated their sweeping (and halakhically dubious) rejection of thousands of converts of whose individual circumstances they knew nothing; a suitable religious response was thus necessary to rescue God’s honor. And finally, if all that were insufficient, there was the blatant personal insult to Druckman – and, by extension, to the entire religious Zionist establishment.
Yet the religious Zionist silence was deafening. Few prominent Zionist rabbis even raised an outcry. The movement’s religious leadership did not convene to formulate a Zionist alternative to the increasingly non-Zionist official rabbinate; only one prominent rabbi, Benny Lau, even publicly urged such a step. Nor did its nine-member Knesset faction hold urgent discussions on reforming the rabbinate via legislation.
But the last straw was a June 5 petition to the High Court of Justice against the verdict. The main petitioner was a woman whose conversion had been overturned, but she was joined by several leading religious Zionist organizations, such as Emunah and Ne’emanei Torah v’Avoda. And the religious Zionist establishment applauded: Amnon Shapira, former secretary-general of the Bnei Akiva youth movement, for instance, termed the petition “the first time the religious Zionist public has told the ultra-Orthodox outright that they have gone far enough.”
NO CLEARER declaration of bankruptcy is imaginable: The religious Zionist establishment publicly announced that it has no religious solution for such quintessentially religious Zionist problems as the role of conversion in assimilating non-Jewish immigrants or the official rabbinate’s role in the state; instead, it is begging a nonreligious court to solve these problems for it.
Religious Zionism has been fading into irrelevancy for so long that one might wonder why it even matters. Yet in fact, a flourishing religious Zionism is crucial to the Jewish state’s survival.
A Jewish state need not be religious, but it must have some Jewish content. Otherwise, it would be just another Western democracy, distinguishable from the rest only by greater military threats and a lower standard of living. Such a state would clearly have trouble either retaining existing citizens or attracting new ones.
However, Jewish content can only come from Judaism, the religion that preserved the Jews as a people for millennia. Thus, should Israelis become convinced that Judaism is incompatible with the needs of a modern state – that Israel can survive only by severing all ties with Judaism – that would sound the Jewish state’s death knell.
Unfortunately, some current Jewish practice is incompatible with the needs of a modern state – not because Judaism and statehood are inherently incompatible, but because for 2,000 years of exile, halakhic development necessarily focused on enabling the Jewish people to survive that exile. And the requirements of survival in exile, where issues such as defense, economics and immigration are simply irrelevant, differ vastly from those of survival in one’s own state. Thus, just as 2,000 years ago Jewish law had to make the wrenching change from a code designed for sovereignty to a code designed for exile, it must now make the same wrenching change in reverse. And only those committed to halakha and statehood alike can realistically effect this change.
Ironically, a new poll shows that secular Israelis instinctively understand this need. The poll, commissioned by the Absorption Ministry, found that 60 percent of secular Israelis worry that the influx of non-Jewish immigrants will lead to assimilation. Astonishingly, however, 74 percent said the best solution to this problem is for the immigrants to undergo Orthodox conversion. Granted, they attached a rider no Orthodox rabbi could accept: that such conversions be divorced from acceptance of Jewish law. But the very fact that they chose Orthodox conversion as their preferred solution shows an instinctive realization that the state’s problems must be resolved within the framework of Jewish tradition if it is to remain Jewish.
This task is enormously difficult, but it should not be impossible: After all, Jewish law was created for life in a sovereign state. Nevertheless, this is the greatest challenge Judaism has faced in 2,000 years. And meeting it will require the brightest, most creative and boldest religious Zionism possible – not a cowardly so-called religious Zionism that offers nothing but a choice between abdication to the ultra-Orthodox and abdication to the secular courts.
His first major victory was, of course, his reestablishment of de facto control over Lebanon, just three years after losing it to the Cedar Revolution. Under Lebanese law, major governmental decisions require a two-thirds majority, so last month’s agreement awarding Hizbullah one-third of Lebanon’s cabinet seats gives the organization, and hence its Syrian patron, veto power over government decisions. This victory stemmed directly from the Second Lebanon War in 2006: The IDF’s failure to defeat a much smaller and more poorly equipped terrorist organization greatly boosted Hizbullah’s prestige, and consequently its political power, while the loophole-ridden cease-fire that ended the war enabled Hizbullah to rearm so thoroughly that it could successfully mount the military putsch that produced May’s agreement.
This achievement, however, was swiftly followed by another no less significant: Syria’s sudden emergence from the economic isolation that has been strangling its economy. This not only bolsters Assad’s rule, but also deprives the West of its main lever over Damascus.
Syria has recently reported a surge in investment and trade from the Gulf states, and European diplomats report that these states intend to boost their investments still further in an effort to woo Damascus from its alliance with Teheran. As evidence of these growing ties, Assad visited Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates last week, just days after hosting Qatar’s emir in Damascus.
Moreover, Syria’s relations with Europe are also thawing, meaning aid and trade might soon flow from that direction as well. Last month, for instance, Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Moratinos paid his first visit to Damascus in a year. A few days later, French President Nicolas Sarkozy telephoned Assad, after months in which Paris had frozen high-level contacts with Damascus due to Syria’s interference in Lebanon. Significantly, this occurred just a week after Hizbullah’s putsch secured it veto power – which should have increased French outrage at Hizbullah’s patron rather than prompting reconciliation.
Clearly, these developments bode well for Syria’s economy. But equally important is what they portend for efforts to modify Syria’s behavior. After all, the West had long promised to reward Syria with trade and investment if it stopped interfering in Lebanon and supporting terror. But now, not only is Syria securing these benefits without modifying its behavior, it is doing so precisely because of its refusal to modify its behavior: Assad’s alliance with the region’s biggest rogue state, Iran, is precisely what persuaded the Gulf States to offer their gifts unconditionally, in an effort to compete with Teheran. And Europe now seems poised to follow suit.
One might wonder what Olmert had to do with all this. The answer is twofold.
HIS FIRST contribution is reflected in a claim made to Haaretz by a Moratinos aide: that the Gulf states are linking their investment to progress in the recently announced Israeli-Syrian talks. That seems far-fetched, since Gulf officials themselves cite Iran as the impetus for their aid-and-trade initiative. Nevertheless, the Israeli-Syrian talks provided a useful fig leaf: They enabled the Gulf states to pretend that they are rewarding good behavior – efforts to resolve a major regional conflict – rather than appeasing bad behavior.
This fig leaf is also what enabled Europe’s rapprochement with Syria: Sarkozy, for instance, officially called Assad to express support for the talks with Israel. It seems clear that Europe wanted to mend its relationship with Syria anyway: Otherwise, it would not be rushing ahead so fast that, according to media reports, the Foreign Ministry has been reduced to begging European states to slow down until Assad proves he is serious about peace. But Olmert’s initiative provided the necessary excuse.
Olmert’s second contribution, however, was even more significant: His bungling produced a string of Iranian victories around the region, and it was these victories that turned Iran into such a regional threat that Syria, its junior partner, is now being courted in the hope of reducing Teheran’s power by splitting the alliance.
First and foremost, of course, was his performance during the Second Lebanon War, since Hizbullah’s victory was naturally perceived as a victory for its chief financiers, arms suppliers and trainers: Syria and Iran.
The same goes for Olmert’s performance in the south, where an even smaller and more poorly equipped terrorist organization has rained rockets on Israel with impunity for years. Just as with Hizbullah in Lebanon, Hamas’s “victory” stems entirely from Olmert’s decision to confine the IDF to aerial strikes and small-scale maneuvers rather than ordering a major ground operation of the type that virtually eradicated terror from the West Bank in recent years. But the Arab world’s perception is that a small terrorist group has intimidated the mighty IDF. And that redounds to the credit of Hamas’s chief backer, Iran.
FINALLY, OLMERT has facilitated Iran’s unimpeded drive to acquire nuclear weapons, which has also greatly bolstered its prestige. Clearly, the chief culprits here are those countries, like Russia, that have fecklessly prevented truly painful sanctions on Iran. Yet Olmert has encouraged this fecklessness by praising rather than decrying it. While in Moscow last fall, for instance, he publicly praised Russia’s stance on Iran – whereupon Russia promptly resumed nuclear fuel shipments to Iran’s Bushehr reactor and gutted yet another round of sanctions on Teheran. After all, Israel is the country Iran’s president keeps threatening to destroy. So if even Israel publicly deems the current pathetic efforts sufficient, who are other countries to disagree?
Olmert has thus made major contributions to all of Assad’s recent successes: His bungled Lebanon war helped Syria reassert control over Lebanon; his peace initiative provided both Europe and the Gulf states with a fig leaf for ending Syria’s economic isolation; and his multiple failures in dealing with Iran greatly bolstered the clout of its Syrian protégé. Altogether, it is an impressive record of prime ministerial achievement. It is just too bad the beneficiary was an enemy country rather than his own.
A brief recap: Three of Gil’s seven MKs sought to split off and form an independent faction – which by law, one-third or more of a faction may do, provided the Knesset House Committee approves. However, the breakaway MKs then signed a deal with businessman Arkadi Gaydamak under which he promised to match their government funding (thereby doubling their budget), pay salaries to 22 party employees, and give all three MKs safe slots on the list he plans to field next election.
Most of the Knesset opposed this deal, saying it amounted to letting a wealthy businessman openly buy three MKs. The breakaways therefore removed the contract’s financial clauses and insisted that no oral promises had replaced them. But a majority of the House Committee disbelieved them, and consequently vetoed the split until the deal with Gaydamak was scrapped entirely. Seemingly, the Knesset’s self-policing mechanism had worked.
IN REALITY, however, the breakaways’ initial bid failed only because it was a bit too blatant. Had they concluded a quiet handshake deal with Gaydamak rather than a written contract, they would probably have encountered scant opposition. After all, they would hardly have been the first MKs to cross party lines for personal gain, either political or financial.
In 1995, for instance, Gonen Segev and Alex Goldfarb, who won election on the far-right Tsomet list, broke away and provided the last two votes needed to pass the Oslo-2 Accord. In exchange for betraying their voters, they received a ministry and deputy ministry, respectively, thereby gaining both politically and financially: Higher salaries and pensions, plus perks such as free mail and telephone for the rest of their lives, add up to benefits worth tens or even hundreds of thousands of shekels over a normal lifetime. Yet the Knesset not only approved this deal; it retroactively amended a law banning such quid pro quos in order to do so.
The Knesset also approved Likud’s split over the disengagement, even though the breakaways were defying a clear mandate from Likud members (disengagement lost an internal Likud referendum by a 60-40 margin) and gaining political benefits thereby: Since then premier Ariel Sharon led the new Kadima faction, the breakaways would receive all the plum governmental jobs.
Clearly, MKs neither can nor should be barred from changing their minds. A good MK owes his voters his best judgment, and sometimes, that does mean changing his views, whether due to changed circumstances or a changed understanding of existing circumstances. Yet neither is an MK an autonomous agent: As an elected representative, he is supposed to represent his voters.
MOST DEMOCRACIES resolve this contradiction by requiring every parliamentarian to seek reelection from the same voters who elected him originally. If they reelect him despite a policy change, it will be retroactively clear that they approved this change. If not, his betrayal will cost him his seat – a price that would make most MKs think long and hard before executing a policy u-turn.
But in Israel, because MKs are elected by party lists rather than individually, no such balancing mechanism exists: An MK who betrays his original voters can simply switch parties and get reelected by different voters. Thus he pays no price for his betrayal, and his original voters can do nothing but swallow their bile and hope for better luck with their next vote.
Had the Gil breakaways’ original deal been approved, for instance, they would probably have won reelection, since most polls show Gaydamak’s planned list making it into the Knesset. But they might well have been reelected by different voters: Those who supported Gil last election are not necessarily those who back Gaydamak today.
Similarly, while some Kadima breakaways were reelected by the same voters, since many Likud voters switched to Kadima, others were reelected by people who had previously voted for different parties.
This situation is devastating for democracy in two ways. First, of course, it encourages MKs to betray their voters for personal gain, since they need not fear losing their seats in consequence. The Gil breakaways were a particularly egregious example, but in practice, they merely did openly what many MKs before them did only slightly more subtly.
Even worse, however, is the impact on voters’ faith in the system. It is no accident that this growing phenomenon of MKs switching parties for personal gain has been accompanied by a steep decline in voter turnout rates, from roughly 80 percent in every election through 1999 to 69 percent in 2003 and 64 percent in 2006. If people feel that their vote is meaningless – that once elected, an MK can do whatever he pleases, and voters can neither stop him nor even punish him – then there is little incentive to vote.
BUT A citizen who refrains from voting because he considers his vote meaningless is someone with no stake in the system. He has no reason to try to affect policy through political activity, since he does not believe political activity can affect policy. And he has no incentive to refrain from resorting instead to violence, since he does not believe he is thereby defying the majority’s will, as reflected through its MKs; he is merely defying the will of 120 cynics whose positions du jour are influenced more by momentary personal interests than by their voters’ views.
A democracy can survive a few such disaffected citizens, but it cannot survive too many of them. And anyone who talks with ordinary Israelis will quickly realize that our falling voter turnout indeed reflects a growing number of citizens who consider voting pointless.
This problem has only one remedy: revamping our electoral system so that MKs are directly elected, and must seek reelection from the same constituency. Otherwise, Israelis’ disaffection with democracy will continue to grow – thereby endangering the country’s survival as a democratic state.
Yet such accusations miss the point. The problem is not that Barak, Sharon and Olmert all acted after becoming embroiled in difficulties; it is that in each case, their actions directly contradicted their own previously stated views of Israel’s interests, with no explanation of their about-face. And that, rather than their legal/political difficulties per se, is what truly enables suspicions that they are sacrificing Israel’s well-being to their political survival.
Imagine, for instance, that a diehard dove like Yossi Beilin were a) prime minister and b) under police investigation. Would anyone seriously argue that any diplomatic initiative he launched was aimed at saving his political skin? Of course not – because such initiatives clearly accord with his longstanding view of Israel’s fundamental interests. The Barak, Sharon and Olmert initiatives, however, were all repudiations of their previous positions.
Barak, for instance, quit the Camp David summit in July 2000 – despite having staked his career on its success – after concluding that Yasser Arafat’s refusal to budge on key issues made further Israeli concessions foolhardy. Yet at Washington and Taba five months later (December 2000-February 2001), he suddenly offered new concessions, on both borders and Jerusalem, that he had previously deemed unacceptable, even though Arafat still refused to concede the “right of return” or any Jewish connection to the Temple Mount – and even though the intifada, which erupted in September 2000, should have made his Camp David demand for defensible borders more pressing rather than less. And he never explained this reversal.
In July, however, Barak’s political career still seemed salvageable, as Bill Clinton publicly blamed Arafat for the summit’s failure. By December, the intifada had decimated his popularity, and his Knesset support. New elections were imminent, and Barak would be trounced – unless he could regain support from leftists, Arabs and even some peace-hungry centrists by producing an agreement, any agreement, with the Palestinians.
Thus Barak abandoned his own red lines, without explanation, when such concessions promised political salvation. And that, rather than his political troubles per se, is what enabled suspicions that he was sacrificing Israel’s interests to his political survival.
SIMILARLY, SHARON won election in January 2003 by running against his opponent’s proposal to withdraw unilaterally from Gaza. Sharon claimed unilateral withdrawal would undermine Israel’s security: It would bolster support for terrorism, and establish a terrorist entity on Israel’s border whose attacks would be unpreventable once the army left.
By autumn 2003, however, Sharon was in trouble: A police investigation was accelerating, the media deemed him corrupt and demanded his ouster, and his public support plummeted. To survive, he needed a distraction, and in December, he produced it: a plan to unilaterally withdraw from Gaza.
The trick worked. Allegations of corruption virtually disappeared from the media, replaced by praise for his statesmanship. From an international pariah, he became the world’s darling. The police investigation, which had been spurred by media pressure, stalled once this pressure disappeared. And his popularity soared.
Yet Sharon never explained his about-face, never even tried to refute his own previous arguments for why unilateral withdrawal was dangerous. He simply abandoned his own red lines without explanation, at a time when this eased his legal/political problems. And that, rather than these problems per se, is what enabled suspicions that he was sacrificing Israel’s interests to his political survival.
THEN THERE is Olmert, who, in September 2006, declared that while he is premier, “the Golan will remain forever part of Israel.” The Golan, he argued, is strategically vital, and Syrian President Bashar Assad is untrustworthy; hence talks aimed at giving Assad the Golan would be foolhardy.
The Golan has not suddenly changed, nor has Assad’s behavior. He still hosts Palestinian terrorists in Damascus and funnels terrorists into Iraq; his alliance with Iran has only deepened; and his meddling in Lebanon has intensified: witness Hezbollah’s recent military putsch, which secured it veto power over Beirut’s government.
Indeed, even as the secret talks progressed, Assad accelerated arms shipments to Hizbullah, thereby tripling its pre-Lebanon War rocket supply. Just days before the talks went public, the Syrian-sponsored PFLP-GC organization claimed responsibility for a rocket strike on an Ashkelon mall. And three days after the talks were announced, Syrian officials went to Iran to discuss a military defense pact – though ending the Syrian-Iranian alliance is a key Israeli demand in the talks. None of this makes Assad a better peace partner than he was two years ago; quite the contrary. Yet Olmert has never explained why his views on Assad and the Golan changed.
Since 2006, however, Olmert’s legal troubles have ballooned, as have the media’s demands for his head. He needed a distraction to stop the media’s hounding, and perhaps also to make the legal authorities fear the diplomatic consequences of indicting him. The Syria talks provide one.
Thus as with Barak and Sharon, the problem is not his legal/political troubles per se; it is that he abandoned his own red lines, without explanation, at a time when doing so could alleviate these troubles. And that is what enables suspicions that he is sacrificing Israel’s interests to his political survival.
Such behavior should be unacceptable. But as long as the tactic keeps working, prime ministers will have every reason to continue this troubling pattern.
That Israel is in fact of only marginal interest to bin Laden is amply demonstrated by his own words and actions. Indeed, his December message implicitly acknowledged as much by vowing to “expand” his jihad to Israel: If the Palestinian cause were truly al-Qaida’s chief concern, why was it “expanding” its jihad to Israel only now, after years of successfully staging attacks in almost every other quarter of the globe?
Israel, after all, is not a difficult target, as repeated attacks by Palestinian and Lebanese terrorists make clear. Its neighbors all have large Muslim populations that loathe it, and Israel itself has a large and disaffected Muslim population; thus al-Qaida would have a wide choice of potential recruits and staging grounds.
Yet to date, there has not been a single documented al-Qaida attack on Israel – even as the organization successfully staged attacks in countries as diverse as the United States, Kenya and Saudi Arabia, while helping allies stage additional attacks in countries from Indonesia to Spain. Given al-Qaida’s track record, there is only one possible explanation for this failure: The group has never seriously tried to target Israel.
EXPERTS ON al-Qaida agree that Israel is far from being the organization’s primary concern. David Schenker, a research fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told The New York Times in October 2001 that bin Laden’s first call for jihad, issued in 1992, made almost no mention of Palestine; its primary target was America. His 1996 fatwa cited Palestine as merely one item in “an endless list of Muslim grievances against the United States and injustices endured by Muslims in Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya, Somalia, Kashmir, the Philippines, Tajikistan and Eritrea, to name a few,” the paper reported. His 1998 fatwa deemed Saudi Arabia his top concern, followed by Iraq; Jerusalem – which is of lesser religious importance than either Saudi Arabia, Islam’s birthplace, or Iraq, seat of the last Arab-Islamic caliphate – got only third billing.
Tunisian intellectual Al-Afif al-Akhdar highlights the fact that bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, wrote a book in which he listed the movement’s three main goals as “religious rule based on Shari’a [Islamic law], forging ties with believers only; and total and immediate severance from the unbelievers.” In other words, Akhdar explained in a 2006 interview with Haaretz, al-Qaida’s main goal is to reshape the Muslim world into an Islamic theocracy that maintains no ties with the West; issues such as Palestine are “second-tier.”
But if Israel is not a major concern for al-Qaida – if it is in fact of so little concern that not one of al-Qaida’s numerous and globe-spanning attacks has targeted it – why has it increasingly starred in the organization’s rhetoric since 2001?
According to Akhdar, this is a tactic to muster support for the organization among Muslims worldwide, for whom “liberating Palestine” is a far more enticing cause than “religious rule based on Shari’a.”
YET SUCH rhetoric almost certainly has another goal as well: to divide and weaken the West by deceiving it about al-Qaida’s true intentions.
That bin Laden seeks to divide the West is obvious: Just consider the Qaida-assisted pre-election bombing in Spain in 2004, which toppled a pro-American government and replaced it with one whose first move was to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq. His interest in doing so is equally obvious: The last thing he wants is for the West to unite and wage war against al-Qaida as it did against Nazi Germany. But since most Westerners would hardly be enthusiastic about seeing the entire Muslim world become a theocracy whose sole interest in the West is waging jihad against it, dividing the West requires deceiving it about al-Qaida’s true aims.
And Israel is clearly the perfect issue for this purpose. In Europe, as repeated polls have found, it is already the world’s most unpopular country, and even in America, a vocal minority has long argued that US support for Israel is the main reason it has become a target for Islamist terror. Thus if bin Laden can convince Westerners that his main goal is ending Israel’s “occupation of Palestine,” rather than transforming the Muslim world into a jihadist theocracy, they will view al-Qaida not as an implacable enemy that must be fought, but as an organization that can be persuaded to abandon violence by placating its legitimate grievances.
At the very least, a critical mass of such people would effectively paralyze the West: Far from being able to mobilize to combat al-Qaida and its allies effectively, the free world would be bogged down in endless arguments over whether the organization should be opposed or appeased. And if the appeasement camp were strong enough to pressure Israel into major concessions, al-Qaida would gain a double victory: Western concessions typically increase support for jihadist groups among ordinary Muslims, by enabling these groups to portray themselves as the winning side against a West in retreat.
Bin Laden has sowed his seeds of division expertly. But only the West can make his “divide and conquer” strategy succeed. If it remains focused on his true aims – which he has taken little trouble to conceal – and acts accordingly, his strategy will fail. But if too many Westerners are deceived by his claim that Palestine is the “core reason for the war between our civilization and your civilizations,” al-Qaida will have racked up another major victory on its road to the theocratic Islamic superstate of its dreams.
These figures reflect a growing trend of secular interest in Israel’s Jewish heritage, which has also sparked numerous programs for adults in recent years. These include the establishment of several secular mechinot, where students spend a year between high school and army engaged in Jewish studies; a secular yeshiva; secular batei midrash (study groups); and numerous institutions that offer adult education programs in Jewish studies for the secular public. The TALI school system – secular schools with a mandatory enhanced Jewish studies curriculum – has also boomed, growing 30 percent in the last three years alone, to 165 schools with some 35,000 students.
While none of the above programs approach Jewish texts from an Orthodox perspective, the texts themselves – Bible, Talmud, medieval Jewish philosophers – are the same as would be found in any Orthodox high school or yeshiva. And the goals are similar as well: to engage with the texts on their own terms in order to plumb the richness of Judaism’s cultural heritage.
“We want to build a generation of male and female scholars who know the texts, to make them desire Torah study for its own sake,” declared Eran Baruch, head of the Bina Center for Jewish Studies, which runs the secular yeshiva, in a newspaper interview last year. That is a sentiment any Orthodox yeshiva head could endorse. So is the explanation offered by Dr. Eilon Shamir for the new program on “social Judaism” that he helped to launch at Beit Berl, whose courses cover topics such as attitudes toward “the other” in the Talmud: “We want to present Judaism as something that represents holiness and refinement of our natures, in contrast to the cynicism and egoism of capitalist culture.”
THIS BURGEONING secular interest in Jewish studies is good news for Israel for two reasons. First, it could ease the religious-secular rift that increasingly threatens the country’s future. While this rift has many causes, it has been exacerbated by the fact that many secular Jews are largely unconversant with basic Jewish texts. This ignorance facilitates both the religious dismissal of secular culture as “non-Jewish” and the secular dismissal of religious culture as “benighted.”
But secular Israelis’ growing realization that these texts are their heritage as well creates the basis of a common language that could help to bridge these differences. It is easy for religious Jews to sniff at secular counterparts who quote UN conventions as the source of their values, but harder to dismiss secular Jews who quote the Talmud as the source of these same values. Similarly, it is easy for secular Jews to sneer at religious Jews who find their life’s meaning in ancient texts, but harder to do so when they themselves see these texts as sources of inspiration and meaning.
Moreover, this development provides a potential basis for joint social action. Such action is already a focus of many of the new secular programs: Shamir, for instance, started his program because he believes Judaism can serve as the basis for a struggle to improve society; at the secular yeshiva, students must devote part of their time to working with students from nearby slums. And a similar trend is burgeoning in the religious community, from “urban settlements” – groups of young religious Jews who “settle” in distressed neighborhoods and run programs for the residents – to organizations like Bemaaglei Tzedek, which issues “social kashrut certificates” to eateries that pay their workers fair wages and benefits. Thus one can easily imagine fruitful cooperation between religious and secular Jews who both seek to improve the world through social action based on Jewish values. And nothing could do more to promote religious-secular rapprochement.
But there is also a more fundamental reason why this growing secular interest in Jewish sources bodes well for Israel’s future: Without nurturing its cultural Jewish roots, Israel is liable to indeed become a nation of “Hebrew-speaking goyim,” as some religious Jews contemptuously deem it, lacking any distinct Jewish identity. And if the Jewish state is culturally indistinguishable from any other Western state, its citizens are liable to question whether the sacrifices necessary to maintain it are worthwhile.
For any society, nurturing cultural roots begins with studying that society’s canonical texts. Thus students in all Western countries study foundational texts of both Western civilization in general and their own countries in particular. For a Jewish state, these texts are the Bible, the Talmud and the medieval commentators and Jewish philosophers. One need not agree with these texts, any more than one must agree with Shakespeare. Indeed, classical Jewish commentators frequently disagree with each other. But to be an educated Jew, or an educated resident of the Jewish state, familiarity with them is essential.
For too long, secular Israelis have dismissed these classical texts as outdated and irrelevant. But today – as Shuki Yaniv, principal of a Beersheba high school that recently introduced a course on Jewish liturgical poetry as an elective, explained in a newspaper interview two weeks ago – “there is much greater awareness [among the secular]… that engaging with Judaism is not only for the religious, and that it also appropriate for our students to study Judaism.”
Indeed, Judaism is the cultural heritage of every Jew, religious and secular alike. And today, more and more secular Israelis are seeking to reclaim this heritage. It is easy to underestimate the significance of this trend, because its impact on Israeli society will be felt only years down the road. Yet few developments could do more to ensure that we will still be celebrating the Jewish state’s birthday in another 60 years.
Two weeks ago, for instance, the New York Times/International Herald Tribune ran a report on the latest poll by Khalil Shikaki’s Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR). It stated that Shikaki “was shocked” because the poll “showed greater support for violence than any other he had conducted over the past 15 years… Never before, he said, had a majority favored an end to negotiations or the shooting of rockets at Israel.”
Shikaki’s “explanation for the shift,” it continued, “is that recent actions by Israel, especially attacks on Gaza that killed nearly 130 people, an undercover operation in Bethlehem that killed four militants and the announced expansion of several West Bank settlements, have led to despair and rage among average Palestinians.”
The message could not be clearer: The normally peace-loving Palestinians, who previously opposed rocket attacks on Israeli civilians, have been driven to violence by Israel’s brutality. There is only one problem: Shikaki’s claim is utterly false.
HIS LATEST poll found that 64 percent of Palestinians favored rocket attacks on Israeli civilians. Far from being unprecedented, however, that figure is almost identical to what it was 18 months ago, according to Shikaki’s own data: A PSR poll conducted in late August, 2006 found that 63 percent of Palestinians favored such attacks. And it is lower than the figure in some earlier Shikaki polls: In September 2004, for instance, PSR found that 75 percent of Palestinians supported rocket attacks on Israel.
The other leading Palestinian pollster, the Jerusalem Media and Communications Center, has consistently produced similar results: A JMCC poll from July 2006, for instance, found that 60 percent of Palestinians supported rocket attacks on Israel.
In other words, peace-loving Palestinians have not been suddenly radicalized by Israeli brutality; they have supported rocket attacks on Israeli civilians from the moment they acquired this capability.
This is not a trivial issue. First, the main international criticism of Israel’s counterterrorism operations in Gaza is that they hurt “innocent civilians.” Yet that argument loses much of its force if those “innocent civilians” actually support the rocket attacks, because repeated studies have shown that whether terrorist organizations wither or thrive depends substantially on the support they receive from the local population. Thus a populace that backs terrorist activities is not “innocent,” it is an active and essential contributor to the terrorists’ success.
This is even truer for the Palestinians, because Hamas is not only a terrorist organization; it is also an elected ruling party. Public opinion is thus an especially crucial component of its power, one it cannot afford to totally disregard. Hence were ordinary Palestinians largely opposed to rather than supportive of rocket attacks, Hamas would be much more likely to restrain both its own military wing and smaller groups like Islamic Jihad.
Israeli operations in Gaza are also routinely slammed as counterproductive – which might be valid if these operations indeed increased support for anti-Israel attacks. But if support for rocket attacks against Israel has remained steadily high for years, regardless of the ups and downs of the fighting, that claim, too, loses much of its force.
THE SHIKAKI poll, of course, is merely one of many Palestinian lies that have gone unrefuted by Israel. Another excellent example is the partial fuel embargo on Gaza.
Palestinians have had great success in charging that this embargo deprives them of fuel for such humanitarian essentials as pumping water and running hospital generators. Israel routinely counters that it does provide enough fuel for humanitarian needs, but since it never provides evidence to back this assertion, the world has largely dismissed it.
Yet such evidence is readily available: One need look no farther than the New York Times.
On February 26, for instance, the International Herald Tribune ran a Times report on a protest against the Israeli embargo that Hamas organized in northern Gaza. Of the approximately 4,000 demonstrators, it said, “many were schoolchildren who arrived directly from their classrooms … They had been bused in to join the protest, despite complaints from Gaza about a dire shortage of gasoline because of the Israeli sanctions.”
On March 11, the Times reported on another Hamas-organized protest, in Gaza City. Palestinian livestock owners “were paid 100 shekels each (about $28) to attend the protest, as well as transportation costs. Hundreds of animals – sheep, camels and donkeys – came from all over Gaza.”
Busing in schoolchildren from all over Gaza guzzles fuel; so does trucking in livestock from all over Gaza. Thus clearly, Hamas has fuel for things it deems important. If it considers anti-Israel demonstrations more important than supplying hospitals and pumping stations, that is hardly Israel’s fault; it is Hamas that has chosen to deprive its own people in order to score propaganda points.
Again, this is a nontrivial issue. Virtually nothing could damage Israel’s image more than people worldwide imagining Palestinian children with no water to drink, or hospitals unable to perform lifesaving operations, due to an Israeli embargo. And virtually nothing could damage Hamas’s image more than having people worldwide realize that it is cynically withholding vital fuel from its own people in order to make Israel look bad.
It would be nice if journalists, world leaders and international human rights organizations consistently noticed such lies on their own, but the reality is that they rarely have the time, energy or interest to do the necessary research. For Israel, however, exposing Palestinian lies is a vital interest. Hence it is Israel’s responsibility to invest the resources necessary to document these lies and expose them to international opinion leaders.
That would still be only one small element of the comprehensive public relations strategy that Israel needs. But it would be far better than the current policy of letting such damaging lies go unchallenged.